SUVA

Challenge

Sydney's Unique Venues Association (SUVA) is one of Australia's most prestigious collections of venues. SUVA is a collaboration of over 60 unique venues in and around Sydney that specialise in making unique locations available for any event - conferences, meetings, corporate hospitality, cocktail parties, gala dinners, wedding receptions and film and photography.

Each venue have has its own charm and offers something truly unique, from spectacular harbour views to venues with educational and historical value or beautiful gardens and outdoor facilities. Many are Sydney icons and landmarks that offer a great alternative to traditional function centres and hotels.

The website redevelopment project was to bring a fresh and contemporary design to the SUVA brand and ensure the content was available to the target audiences on all devices including desktop, tablet and smartphone.

Each venue was to have its own page within the site where it could showcase the venue, its location, attractive imagery, its facilities and rooms that could cater for varying numbers of attendees and also provide a means for potential clients to contact them directly with their enquiries. This was a key requirement as the website is a major source of new business for the association.

Solution

Digital Garden worked closely with the SUVA tea team made up of venue and booking managers from some of SUVA’s properties to ensure that all requirements were gathered and a solution to fulfil these was designed and developed.

The team developed the SUVA website on a Drupal CMS platform with a fresh, contemporary, yet professional design appealing to the corporate and agency event managers audience. Directly from the home page of the site users are able to search for venues that could cater for their specific requirements in terms of venue size, people it could accommodate, the types of functions they were looking to organise.

When presented with a list of venues fitting their criteria they are able to view each of the venues’ detail pages to further refine their selection before being able to send their enquiry directly to the sales manager at each venue.

As part of the project, Digital Garden’s design team also refreshed the SUVA logo and corporate branding, bringing a modern, contemporary look to the name and identity.

Results

The website was relaunched in early 2015 to high acclaim from the SUVA membership of venue managers applauding a more modern look and feel to the site. The Responsive Design website has been overwhelmingly well received as it now opens up opportunities for potential clients to be able to search, view and enquire about future events directly from their mobile devices wherever and whenever they want.

So far, the reaction from the venue managers have been very positive as they have seen an increase in the new enquiries received compared to the same time in the previous year.

Searching over 60 unique venues

with the new intuitive search filters

Logo refresh

The new, simpler logo has given SUVA a more contemporary brand positioning, we retained the original design of the 'A' as we felt this was a distinctive and recognisable element to the old identity and the introduction of the black has given the logo strength and clarity.